23 June 2013 11:16 PM

There will be, after the
latest military redundancies have taken effect, around 82,000 soldiers in the
army, its smallest strength for 200 years.

This is almost
exactly half the number of lawyers in the country.

Members of
the armed forces take things like the sack with the same sort of stoic
resignation with which they take orders.

They generally keep
their dignity even when severely provoked by hearing about average £10,000
performance bonuses for Ministry of Defence bureaucrats of questionable
competence.

Lawyers less so.

You will
have noticed a lot of protest recently from lawyers and judges about legal aid
cuts. The rule of law is at stake, the sacred principle of access to justice is
threatened, it’s illegal under equality law, and, the worst of it, there won’t
be enough taxpayer money to keep all the lawyers in employment.

The latest in
the campaign to halt this terrible injustice is a lawyers’ mass lobby of
Parliament to be held next week. Do not mock. This could turn nasty. Lawyers
also outnumber policemen, so there is a prospect of the bewigged dispossessed
creating scenes reminiscent of Turkey or Brazil.

The good news is
that the judiciary have taken steps to prevent the disaster of unemployment in
the legal profession with a spectacularly original Supreme Court ruling. This
says that the Human Rights Act applies to British forces in action abroad.

The judgement
has a lot of implications, but it’s safe to sum them up in the Bolshevik-style
slogan that gets to the heart of the Human Rights Act: All Power to the
Lawyers!

Just as the
Bolsheviks sent Red Army officers to war with commissars alongside to ensure
their political correctness, this will mean that in future British army
officers had better make sure they have a lawyer handy any time they think
about giving an order.

The process
is already happening. Royal Navy warships now go to sea with trained lawyers on
the bridge, ready to act ‘as advisers to
deployed operational commanders’.

Plenty of work
here for the solicitors and barristers no longer getting legal aid for
long-drawn out immigration cases. Soldiers will get access to justice. The rule
of law will be upheld on the battlefield. The threat of legal redundancies will
be greatly reduced.

All good things
require change among the reactionary element whose views the Guardian has
started characterising as ‘wicked’, and the stuck-in-the-mud military must drop
its misgivings and learn to love human rights.

Part of this
should be a new understanding of the history that fires the fighting spirit of
the forces. Regiments, warships and squadrons must take a rights-based look at
their own past.

The army must no
longer celebrate Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim. Instead
military lawyers will concern themselves with his wife’s remark on the
aftermath of this regrettable conflict: ‘The Duke returned from the wars today and did
pleasure me in his top-boots.’

I know it’s a long time ago and the Duke is a little bit dead,
but so is Jimmy Savile and that hasn’t stopped the police and the lawyers. I
look forward to a CPS lawyer appearing in front of the cameras to announce the
posthumous rape charge.

The Battle of Trafalgar will be noted for Nelson’s inspiring
signal: ‘The United Kingdom respects every person’s human rights.’

David Cameron will finally get around to announcing Government
involvement in the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of
Waterloo. Maria Miller will explain how the culmination of the Napoleonic wars
was the outcome of Britain’s need to establish a strong European executive in
Brussels.

The charge of the Light Brigade will be misconduct in public
office. The names of Lords Raglan, Lucan and Cardigan will be suppressed and
forgotten, on the orders of the courts, because of the Data Protection Act.

No need to worry about rewriting the history of World War One.
Mr Cameron and Mrs Miller already have the process under way.

In order to encourage the troops and win round sceptical
members of the public, we should have remakes of war films to underline the new
values.

I am sure the BBC and Channel 4 have already gone into
production following my suggestion a few months ago of naval sagas In Which We
Serve a Writ; Legal Action in the North Atlantic; Tag the Bismarck! and the
greatest convoy story of them all, The QC.

We need some more TV series concentrating on the gritty realities
of war. Ice Cold in El Vinos, Reach for the Port, and 633 King’s Bench Walk
Squadron await scriptwriters.

The suffering of captured soldiers will be marked by The Brief
on the River Kwai, in which the Japanese give the prisoners the vote. The cunning
of POWs bribing guards for the materials to make wigs and red ribbons will be
recorded in The Article Eight Escape.

Hollywood can get stuck in with Suing Private Ryan and for
fans of secret adventure the big screen must have The Guns of Santorini.

As Major Clipton observed at the end of River Kwai:
madness, madness. But the judges of the Supreme Court might have considered
that before their obsession with human rights blinded them to the point that
offering a legal right to life and privacy to a soldier at war is the ripest
nonsense.

Perhaps there should have been just one war film remake, and
it should have been done for the sake of a single special showing to the
justices of the Supreme Court. A Brief Too Far.

Share this article:

12 June 2013 7:06 PM

It is an appalling thing, but it seems some women may have
succeeded in getting on in the world of music with the help of their looks.

We are indebted for this insight to Jenni Murray, the
presenter of Woman’s Hour on Radio Four, who has told us ‘the women who seem to
be most welcome are the ones who are prepared to go along with the old idea
that sex sells.’

Perhaps that is why there are so few women composers whose
work we hear in the concert halls and opera houses. If only they had had the
chance to do a turn on the catwalk, perhaps a bikini round, interviews in which
they could talk about their ambition to be an all-round entertainer, then we
might get the odd female-penned tone poem in the Proms.

Or not.

Perhaps it might be instead that Dame Jenni has opened her
mouth with the knee-jerk feminism gear engaged, without regard to tyre wear or
road conditions.

There are a few things that stick in the throat about her
condemnation of sexism in the music world.

The first is the bizarre notion that Jenni Murray appears to
have picked up somewhere that music should be a pure and noble art, untouched
by low and contemptible distractions like sex or showbiz.

I would have thought that performers have been very
obviously using sex to sell elite music to the crowned heads of Europe and
anybody else with any money to pay for it since about the beginning of the 17th
century. Roll over Vivaldi, tell Monteverdi the news.

And the very idea that anybody might try to puff music with
cheap publicity and glamour is entirely offensive, except to Miss Murray’s
employers at the BBC who use exactly those methods to promote the Proms and
Radio Three, and to anybody else over the centuries who ever tried to turn an
honest shilling by advertising to attract an audience.

Then we have Dame Jenni’s list of shame, in which she
trotted out examples of how women have been ‘downgraded, excluded and downright
insulted’ in various instances. There was the conductor who didn’t want fat
women in his orchestra and the percussionist teased about her cymbals, not to
mention the woodwind player subjected to sexual innuendo.

Apparently there was a case in which an orchestra member was
told she was taking a man’s job and should be at home looking after her
children. This happened as recently as 1959, according to Dame Jenni. All very regrettable and unfair.

But, unfortunately, people do behave badly, even in modern
times. We all wish it were otherwise, but there it is. Music has never been
free of the prejudices that infect the rest of the world. If you wanted to look
at the underside of the history of music, you might, for example, find a bit of
anti-semitism there as well.

Is that any reason to pick on the women performers who
succeed?

But that is precisely what Dame Jenni does.

Harping on her theme about how the successful female
musicians are the ones who sell sex, she said: ‘Look at the way violinist
Nicola Benedetti and trumpeter Alison Balsom are marketed.’

What are the highly glamorous Benedetti and Balsom supposed
to do? Suppress their pictures and demand their recordings are sold under plain
cover? Shave their hair, dress frumpy, and try to look ordinary while they
play?

It seems, however, that according to the musical morality of
Jenni Murray, there are legitimate ways in which someone might resort to
shameless self-promotion.

You may, for example, take advantage of your position as a
famous radio presenter to seize the chance to show off by conducting the BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra, when your programme does a special about women in
music.

Dame Jenni, who will entertain us with the overture to
Carmen after first taking an hour’s tuition from conductor Jessica Cottis,
admits to a musical career which amounted to four piano lessons and a spell as
triangle in her school band

Quiet at the back there. It’s nothing to do with Kate
O’Mara’s Triangle.

I’m sure Dame Jenni is using her celebrity selflessly to
advance the cause of women in music.

It’s just that I can’t help feeling she might have given the
airtime and the exposure to someone else, perhaps a young woman conductor, who
might have liked the chance to reach a wider audience than usual.

I’m going to give Dame Jenni’s effort a miss, and stick to
Benedetti and Balsom. They may not score highly on Murray scale of feminist
purity. But at least they can play their instruments.